There are some big questions about what the role of the mainstream media should be, and when it’s meant to be partisan. This may inform why I was so bothered about how a public radio show that’s meant to investigate and analyze the media handled Joe Rogan, viewing it as suspicious when he supported Trump but acceptable when he supported Sanders.
My sense of it is there are two legitimate types of media: nonpartisan and openly partisan. The nonpartisan media gives consumers information to make decisions. Partisan media openly has a side and is transparent about it; National Review leans right, Pod Save America leans left, Reason is libertarian, Jacobin is Socialist, The Florida Catholic favors one particular religion, etc.
There’s a different view that the media should persuade people more covertly but I don’t think that’s going to work. The media should be transparent about their biases, because the point of the media is to inform the public, not to lead them and certainly not to mislead them.
What is the Mainstream Media?
A side-question that needs to be defined is what counts as the mainstream media. Fox News has the best ratings of any cable channel. Joe Rogan episodes reach more people than Washington Post articles. The Daily Wire has branched into hit documentaries. On the other hand, people working for major papers and the other channels don’t really consider themselves as being on the same side as Rogan or Shapiro.
Your mileage may vary, but for these purposes, I would define the mainstream media as any organization that primarily survives on support from taxpayers (NPR, PBS), any of the network evening news shows, any long-lasting periodical that does not explicitly identity as left-leaning, right-leaning or whatever (New York Times, Washington Post, etc.) A trick to determine whether a new organization counts as part of the mainstream media would be the extent to which its employees get jobs in institutions understood to be part of the mainstream media. Megyn Kelly did not last long at NBC, so that suggests Fox News is seen as something different.
Mainstream Media and Biases
The mainstream media should reflexively be unbiased, providing information for citizens to make up their own minds about policies with complex trade-offs. If you believe it’s important for reporters to avoid the appearance of bias by not revealing who they voted for, an informed member of the public should not be able to guess with a high degree of accuracy whether a standard member of a media organization voted for Trump or Harris.
Obviously that’s not how it works. The typical NBC presenter, and the person writing what they read off the teleprompter, do not hold views randomly distributed among the population. There is pushback whenever anyone offends left-wing orthodoxy, as when a CBS reporter asked tough questions of Ta-Nehisi Coates, a left-wing commentator writing about Palestine. Slate ended its relationship with Mike Pesca over his defense in internal discussions of someone mentioning a racial slur that had appeared on the website hundreds of times. A New York Times editor was fired for publishing an article by a Republican Senator. These are places where the center-left is not welcome, let alone the conventional right.
As one more absurd example, Adam Rubenstein described getting called out for liking Chick-Fil-A as a new staffer at the New York Times. It seemed so ridiculous that there were suspicions that he made it up, but Jonathan Chait confirmed that it happened. The incident and the doubts about it mattered, since it reveals different norms within an ostensibly mainstream media outlet than in the larger population.
It’s also important that some people in the media denied that it happened. For Adam Rubenstein and his friends, it would be a matter of honor if people call him a liar when he’s telling the truth. It’s bad if people within an industry don’t understand its biases and it’s bad if the media is wrong. Their main job is to be correct, and to not make mistakes ordinary people make because the civilians lack the professional training to avoid blind-spots and cognitive fallacies. The media is also supposed to help people make sense of the world, so it’s a problem if many of them don’t understand it.
Partisanship in the Media
Some people want the media to be biased. There are arguments within the New York Times and Washington Post about whether reporters should be allowed to be more activist, and it’s always about people who advocate for left-wing causes rather than suggestions for a neutral policy. There seems to be a view among some Democrats that their policies are obviously more popular, so the reason Republicans win is poor messaging, and the media should do more to help Democrats, or is unfairly helping Republicans. But the problem Democrats have persuading swing voters is not due to a lack of criticism against Trump from the New York Times or other institutions in the legacy media.
The main problem with the media, from the perspective of Democrats winning elections, is the coverage of left-wing cultural issues that turn off swing voters (even if the majority of the newsroom agrees with the left on the topic.) Matthew Yglesias had a decent piece on how the values of mainstream journalists end up alienating conservative audiences while crowding out other left-wing views with a focus on the idiosyncratic problems of young urban professionals, who are also inherently pessimistic.
Obviously, partisans want people to speak for them. The anti-Trump conservative writer David French talked about the sense that some readers want him to be a “lawyer for the right,” and it’s a good summary of an expectation by partisans.
He’s a columnist for the New York Times and writes about topics that interest him, whether it ends up supportive of Republican candidates or not. Some readers insist that he tow the party line, and generally come up with the best arguments for the Republican side, as if he were a lawyer. This is an important distinction because when you’re dealing with lawyers, they have clear codes of conduct and there are things they must be transparent about, like the identities of their clients.
It could be interesting for a paper to have columnists who present themselves as lawyers for their side, not expected to say what they believe but to make the best case for a partisan sensibility. That would be fine as long as they’re transparent about it, but partisans don’t really want that, since their new spokesman will be considered as trustworthy as a defense attorney. But it would be transparent, which the media should be.
Media Standards Versus Judgment
One thing that’s relevant to various conversations here are distinctions between rules and discretion, or standards versus judgment. A very quick summary is that some people want concrete rules and others want the discretion to make decisions within larger parameters. In one situation, you have clear regulations, and in the other intelligent people have more flexibility to make the best decisions. Standards work best in a low-trust environment, so I do think it would be a good idea for the media to set up clear standards on how to talk about their most contentious issues. Because I do not trust their judgment. And according to polls, I’m not alone.
There was a controversy recently when NBC hired and fired former RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel as a commentator. It would be one thing if they could explain clearly and unambiguously what makes her worse than all of the former RNC/ DNC chairs who went on to media jobs. Their explanation was terrible. Chuck Todd claimed that hiring Ronna Romney Mcdaniel was hurting existing media credibility, but the problem was the lack of credibility in the first place.
If the claim is that she crossed the line with election denialism, that makes sense, but clear standards should be clarified so that left-wing campaign officials know that if they go too far in a claim it will hurt their professional chances of ever getting hired as commentators later. That seems unlikely.
Independents and the openly partisan media would operate by different rules, but the mainstream media should have clear standards, both so that news consumers have a measure of what’s going on, and so that the people working there have methods to measure whether they’re making the types of mistakes they criticize others for. If the media follows clear standards, the consumers are more informed about what is presented as objectively true, what is speculation and what is opinion.
There are many things the media can do that are useful and informative without being partisan, like going after any politician who says something performative and manipulative with the subtlety and compassion of a hungry lion encountering a gazelle with a limp.
Did you enjoy this piece from this author? If you did check out his prior article on the media Who Says This S*!&– Joe Rogan’s a partisan when he backs Trump, but not Sanders- On the Media
